The National Science Foundation is harnessing the power of the internet to present fascinating multimedia overviews of the several areas of research funded by NSF. In the overview of Chemistry and Materials, otherwise known as the science of stuff, NSF covers the hottest new topics in the field, from concepts of emergence and self-organization to green chemistry to the creation of new molecules and materials. The cool, state-of-the-art research described here is far removed from those torturous lessons in balancing chemical equations that you covered in high school. Here you can find out about what scientists are doing now to understand not only how nature's materials behave at the molecular to nanoscale level, but how to control them and create new materials. Interested in a career in chemistry? This is the place to start.

Imagine a world in which every child has a laptop that can connect with, among other things, the world's major news organizations, libraries, and universities? What could that child do? Better yet, what could they not do? In a new program led by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, children in developing countries such as Africa and China may finally have laptops of their own at a cost of under $100 per laptop. The laptops, scheduled to be distributed by late 2006 or early 2007, will be contain a 500MHz processor running the Linux operating system, 1GB of RAM, and a 1Megapixel color display. Costs will be kept down in part by redesigning the display to use a rear projection image or electionic ink, also developed at the MIT Media Lab. The laptops will be marketed directly to ministries of education particularly in Africa and China in bundles on the order of millions of units and distributed like textbooks, where larger orders will keep per-unit costs down. The laptops will have Wi-Fi wireless connectivity and will connect with each other in a peer-to-peer network "right out of the box". The only real limitation of the $100 laptops compared to more expensive models is that they will lack large amounts of hard disk space. The project is being supported by a consortium of companies including Google, Advanced Micro Devices, and News Corp.

It is said that we know less about the Earth's oceans than we do about the entire surface of the moon, but advances in broadband communications may finally change all that. Several major research intiatives are underway to install cabled observatories offshore the US coastline. NEPTUNE, one of the first and most ambitious programs, intends to create a 2,000 mile-long cabled observatory that wraps around the Juan de Fuca and Gorda oceanic plates off the northwest US coast. Last year, NSF awarded $3.9 million to the University of Washington, University of California, San Diego, and partner institutions to create the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, or LOOKING project, which will design the cyberinfrastructure that is central to NEPTUNE and other observatories, such as the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS) run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Coordination between the various research programs at the national level will be managed and operated by the Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION) program. When installed these observatories will provide for the first time the essential infrastructure needed for long-term, continuous, in situ observations in the deep sea, and will enable scientists to study the oceans from the comfort of their laptops.

A large earthquake occured offshore northern Sumatra on Monday, March 28 at 11:09 PM local time. The USGS reports that at least 290 people were killed, 100 injured, and that the shock was felt as far north at Bangkok, Thailand. The event occured along the same subduction zone plate boundary as the December 26, 2004, magnitude 9.0 event. See the USGS website for further updates.

NASA completed an important first step last week in the effort to locate Earthlike planets outside of our solar system. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA captured direct infrared light from two extrasolar planets for the first time in history. This feat is exceptional given that planets do not give off their own light, but reflect light from their sun. NASA has prepared a long-term research plan dubbed Planet Quest that involves several missions scheduled over the next fifteen years with the objective of finding Earthlike planets outside our solar system. The Planet Quest website contains links to multimedia features and videos including Planet Quest: The Search for Another Earth and PlanetQuest: The Movie. Thus far NASA has indirectly identified more than 140 extrasolar planets, typically by measuring changes in the position or brightness of the host star (see Four ways to find a planet). The high temperatures of the two newly discovered planets, however, make the possibility of either planet supporting life unlikely. Spitzer was not originally designed to detect planets, making this discovery a bonus for the mission.

The Alaskan coastline could be subject to an earthquake and tsunami similar to the Indonesian earthquake that devastated shores around the Indian Ocean last year. The southern Alaskan coastline sits over a seismically active subduction zone; the same type of tectonic setting as the site of the December 26, 2004 Indonesian earthquake. On March 30 at 9:45 am, the entire state of Alaska will receive the first-ever test of the tsunami warning communications system. According to a report released by NOAA, the tsunami alert will involve several federal and local government agencies and include a live television broadcast of tsunami warning codes in addition to a radio broadcast. The last great tsunami to hit Alaska followed a magnitude 9.2 earthquake on March 27, 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded followed now by the magnitude 9.0 Indonesian quake. Tsunami wave heights from the 1964 earthquake reached 67 meters and contributed to 123 deaths in Alaska, Oregon, and California. The test is timed to occur during Tsunami Awareness Week (March 27 - April 2), proclaimed by Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski to mark the anniversary of the great 1964 quake.

At a time when it seems that the U.S. government will go to any length to capture new oil reserves (sorry, Alaska), it is nice to know that some sectors of the government are looking into ways to reduce our dependence on oil. The U.S. Department of Energy even has a website devoted to Fuel Cell Vehicles. Fuel cells are one of the most promising new technologies that may revolutionize energy markets and, in particular, give us "zero emission" automobiles that may one day replace internal combustion engines in use today. Fuel cells run on hydrogen gas and produce no pollutants other than water and heat. One of the challenges is finding an efficient and effective way to produce and store hydrogen, which is highly explosive. The DOE has created the FreedomCAR Program in collaboration with major automobile companies Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler to promote research into advantanced technologies that will reduce our dependence on oil and reduce harmful auto emissions into the atmosphere. You can even find funding at the FreedomCAR site to support your own research into alternative fuel technologies. To find out more about how fuel cells work, check out this nifty animated website on the science behind fuel cell technology.

When Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity in 1916, he predicted the existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time created by cosmic events such as supernova explosions or colliding black holes. The technology needed to detect gravitational waves, however, has only recently been developed. In 1999 construction was completed on the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), a $300 million project funded by the National Science Foundation, that consists of two facilities located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, that are designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves. The observational datasets generated by these facilities are so huge that Dr. Bruce Allen, Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a former Ph.D. student of Stephen Hawking, has created the Einstein@home distributed computing project. The project will allow private computer users to search LIGO datasets for evidence of gravitational waves. Modeled on the SETI@home project, computer users download a screensaver program that crunches LIGO data while they are away from their computer. The project will search datasets from both US LIGO observatories as well as the UK-German-led GEO 600 observatory located in Hanover, Germany. The project began with 6,000 users when it launched on February 19th and within two weeks was adding users at a rate of about 1,000 per day. Einstein@home is supported by the American Physical Society as part of the World Year of Physics 2005 celebration.

Don't let a silly thing like the SAT keep you from getting a world-class education. Thanks to MIT's OpenCourseWare project, you can now access materials from more than 900 MIT undergraduate and graduate courses for free, and no registration is required. MIT OpenCourseWare course materials include syllabi, reading lists, study materials, and, for some, even audio and video lectures. You can download lectures in MP3 format from Prof. Gerald E. Schneider's undergraduate course on Neuroscience and Behavior, for example, and listen to them on your iPod. The MIT OCW group expects to have 1800 courses online from all five of MIT's schools representing 33 disciplines by 2008. The things you don't get are access to MIT faculty and a degree at the end to hang on your wall, but those cost only an extra $30,800 per year in tuition and fees, and, oh yeah, that dreaded SAT score.

Has it been a year already? NASA landed its first Mars rover Spirit on January 3, 2004, which was soon followed by the rover Opportunity on January 24, 2004, after a seven-month journey of nearly 300 million miles from planet Earth. To celebrate this historic event, NASA has created a special Mars Anniversary Flash website that reviews the extraordinary accomplishments of the twin rover expeditions to Mars. Take a guided slide show and audio tour, or sit back and watch home movies of the landers as they navigate across the rocky terrain. The Flash website also provides glimpses of Mars missions to come including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission planned to launch in August of this year and arrive in 2006, the Mars Phoenix Lander mission scheduled to arrive on Mars in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory mission planned to arrive in 2010. Among the top priorities of these missions is to study the atmospheric and soil compositions to determine whether environmental conditions have existed that could support life on Mars. You can keep up with the daily progress of the current rover mission by visiting the Mars Exploration Rover Mission homepage.

Let's say you want to measure the daily changes in a period gene, that is, one whose properties change over time. How would you go about doing that? By making a transgenic fly that glows with the period gene, duh! Actually, it took Ph.D. scientists a while to figure that one out, but now you can learn how to create your own glowing transgenic flies in the Virtual Transgenic Fly Lab from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In this virtual lab you do every step yourself from preparing the DNA, to injecting it into fly embryos, to breeding your own glowing flies, and finally to measuring the light with a bioluminescene counter. (White lab coat not included.) This virtual lab isn't dumbed down like many science websites--which is just how we like it. It's a realistic, comprehensive, sophisticated, interactive multimedia lab that will leave you more knowledgeable about genetics and how genetics research is done.

We knew The San Francisco Exploratorium had good taste in its monthly selection of Ten Cool websites. We were especially surprised to hear that they've picked ELEMENT for its top ten list! You can now find us and other cool science websites listed here on the Exploratorium Ten Cool Sites webpage. Thanks Exploratorium!

Scientific research on the December 26, 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami began almost immediately after the first earthquake signals were detected. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF) has prepared a special multimedia report entitled "After the Tsunami" that covers current efforts to understand not only the powerful forces that were responsible for the event, but how to identify early warning signs, communicate critical information to authorities, and mitigate against future disasters. NSF, in addition to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the major funding agencies behind tsunami research being conducted by scientists in the US today.

A five and half day swarm of small earthquakes was detected on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge offshore of the northwest coast of Washington beginning the morning of Sunday, February 27, 2005. Seismic monitoring by NOAA Vents Program scientists using the SOSUS array detected 3,742 earthquakes, the largest reaching a magnitude of 4.9. A rapid response geological survey of the area carried out 6 days later found no new lavas or hydrothermal disturbances at the seafloor, suggesting that the events were caused by an intrusion of magma from deep beneath the ridge crest.

GeoScienceWorld (GSW) announced the launch of its new portal containing 30 leading geoscience journals plus GeoRef on Friday, Feb. 25, 2005. The initial GSW collection incorporates the full-text of 30 journals from 22 leading societies and institutes from six countries. Full-access to all content will be freely available to anyone visiting the site until March 30, 2005. Following the first months free-trial period, anyone will be able to view the titles and abstracts of articles in the GSW journals. Paid subscribers will also have access to the full-text articles, in both HTML and PDF formats, and the ability to search and link using GeoRef. Most of the journals will be complete with full text back to 2000. In addition, subscribers will also have access to older issues of some journals going back as far as 1931.